The present invention relates to the World Wide Web and more particularly to a system and method for providing and displaying information in a World Wide Web browser.
Over the past few years, there has been an explosive increase in the use of the Internet for communication, data transfer, research and recreation. Businesses, educational institutions, individuals, and governments are beginning to use the Internet for everything from personal communications to mission-critical commercial negotiations and transactions. There is now a staggering array of information and content sources and providers available through the Internet, offering up information such as individual stock and portfolio quotations, sporting news and game/event scores, news updates, electronic mail services, etc.
However, a negative consequence of having so many information sources and providers is that accessing all of these information sources and providers in a simple, efficient and intuitive manner can be a difficult process. For example, if a user wishes to view information from multiple electronic mail accounts, the user will typically have to logon separately to each electronic mail provider to view any updated status information about each account. If one or more electronic mail servers are delayed or down for some reason, the user""s access to this information will be severely limited or, at a minimum, be time consuming. Similarly, if a user wishes to view other types of status updates via their browser software, such as up to date stock quotations and sports scores, the user may have to endure lengthy delays if one or more of the servers providing such information is delayed or down.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to be able to check the status of information from multiple information providers, such as provided by information content servers and electronic mail servers, in one simple and intuitive fashion whereby the user would be able to view information from all the information sources in a single display without having the entire display being compromised by a delay at one or more of the multiple information providers.
The present invention is a method for providing and displaying status information from multiple information providers, such as electronic mail servers and information content servers which may provide information related to any number of topics such as health and medicine, weather, entertainment, sports, etc.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the method for providing status information from multiple information servers includes receiving a request for status information from the multiple information servers, acquiring status information from each of the multiple information servers and rendering status images related to the status information received from each of the multiple information servers, wherein the rendering of any one of the status images is not affected by any delay in acquiring status information from any one of the other multiple information servers.
In another embodiment of the present invention, the method for providing a visual representation of information collected from a variety of information sources for display in a single Web page includes receiving a request for information from a plurality of information sources, processing the request for information from the plurality of information sources and displaying the information from each of the plurality of information sources, wherein the information is displayed in a plurality of status images, each of which represent a single information source.
In the present invention, a screen display may be provided to the user which contains a number of status images, each of which relates to a distinct information provider. Each status image may provide the user with information specified by the user, such as in the case of electronic mail, the number of new messages the user has in each electronic mail account. The status images may be updated automatically on a periodic basis or the status images may be updated as soon as a request for information from the user is received.